'Snew with you?

Ok, a little off-topic, but we had insane amounts of snow yesterday & today - so I went out & took pictures of the house and snowdrifts around it.. enjoy!:

Mosaic..

When we first started moving into the house, one of the first things I did was to remove the medecine chest that was in the bathroom. It was a really huge, hideous thing, with fake oak wood trim, a fake frosted-glass door, and it was falling off of the wall. I didn't like it, and I figured it'd be a pretty easy thing to find a halfway decent replacement one.

It was actually harder than I thought it would be to find one of the same size that I actually liked. so we lived for a while with a big hole in the wall, which was actually kinda neat looking..

..and provided us with a place to put the secret name of the house for future generations of owners of the house to one day find and be mystified by:


Eventually I found a medicine chest I liked, in a style I wanted - a sort of semi-retro, simple, metal and glass style, with simple side-to-side sliding doors. Oddly enough, it also turned out to be about the cheapest medicine chest available too, which was kinda nice. I couldn't even find a more expensive one that I liked at all. Unfortunately, the size of the new one left about a 2.5 inch border around it, in the space where the larger older chest was, leaving a gap of either bare wood or drywall between it and the white tile with which most of the bathroom wall is covered.

After thinking about it for a while, it occurred to me to try to put a border mosaic in the gap there, made out of little broken bits of black tile, to sort of reflect the pattern on the shower curtain we'd bought..

.. and my plans to eventually paint black the ugly fake oak wood of the vanity, and the bare wood trim in the bathroom.

After doing a bit of research on how to make a mosaic and lay tile and grout and all that, I went out and bought a handful of black tile and some little square mirror pieces. I took the bag full of black tiles, and proceeded to smash them on the basement floor in their bag, until most of them were appropriately mosaic-sized and randomly shaped.

Taking the tile bits up to the bathroom, I then proceeded to spread out some tile adhesive goop in the area we wanted to put the mosaic, and enlisted the help of Kat to start filling in the area with random bits of broken tile and mirrors. The whole process of putting the tile down took probably about an hour, and I think it came out looking pretty cool!:



The adhesive has to 'cure' for 24 hours at least before you put the grout down to fill in the gaps between the tiles and all, and we haven't gotten to that part yet, but I'll probably do that sometime soon..

Recycling..

This isn't so much about fixing something in the house so much as it is about making something out of something that was here in the house when we moved in..

The old guy who previously owned (and died in) this house was apparently a very paranoid and anxious old dude. Not only are there security cameras on both the front and back porches, an alarm system complete with motion detector, heat sensors, and warning siren with battery back-up..





..but among the things found left behind in the house were an incomplete set of "Anxiety Coaching" self-help videotapes..



At some point before we actually started moving stuff into the house, I decided that I was tired of seeing the light of the motion-detector and knowing that electricity was being wasted on this alarm system that wasn't even being monitored by the alarm system company, since the old guy had been dead for quite some time, so I disarmed the system by simply unplugging it:



What I hadn't counted on, however, was the fact that the system apparently had some kind of battery back-up for when power failures or whatever might happen to occur -- after all, PARANOIA NEVER SLEEPS. What I also didn't know was that the alarm system apparently had some kind of built-in warning signal for when the battery backing-up the system was getting low on power. Because a couple of days after I unplugged the system, Kat and I were standing in the livingroom after bringing a few things over from the apartment, talking quietly, looking curiously at the little alarm control box, when suddenly:

BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!!

The siren started going off! I ran down to the basement, wondering what the heck to do, since I'd already pulled the plug on the system.. All I could do was whip out my pocket knife and - snip! - cut the power line to the siren!

yeesh..

A few weeks later on, it occurred to me it might be fun/useful/interesting to see if I could use this siren for something else, maybe some kind of musical instrument? Right about then I was asked to do a solo performance as part of a series of noise/drone/experimental music evenings at a nearby coffee house, and immediately I knew I had to work the siren into my performance!

I removed the siren from its place on the basement ceiling, checked the back of it where it said it needed 9 volts of power, and tried attaching a little 9V battery to its power cord.. Sure enough: BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!!

Perfect!

So today, after a little digging around at Radio Shack for a 9V battery snap connector and something I could use for a footswitch, I rigged myself up a little foot-switchable siren dealy -- voila!:



Not sure how well this is going to go down in my performance, but it was kinda fun to make..